OS X :: Time Machine Slow Initial Backup - Fix
Oct 31, 2007
My initial experiences with time machine were not great, glacially slow initial backup rate, left external HDD in unstable state that could not be repaired, stuck on "preparing" etc. The initial backup rate was minutes per Mb-unacceptable. Here are some steps I took, based on watching this and apple support discussion groups--this may not work for all problems being experienced. Turn off time machine Although TM doesn't require exclusive use of an external drive and will use HDs that have other data, you are placing those data at risk: Before you turn on TM backup anything you have on your intended time machine external disk, partition (as GUID) first, then erase (format as HFS extended, journaled) and check/repair permissions. (Don't let time machine format the disk)
- Exclude the external disk from spotlight indexing (or turn off spotlight altogether); certainly do not commence initial backup while spotlight is performing initial index after leopard install
- Turn off any virus checking!
- Remove TM plist file from any previous attempts and erase and trash any previous backup files
- Exclude any large frequently updated database files (Entourage, Parallels) from time machine.
If you have multiple drives that you don't intend including in your routine backup, make sure you exclude them in TM. Avoid daisy chained FW drives for the initial backup, time machine disk should be directly connected. That's about it, Time Machine backed up a ~90G system from a 2.4Ghz SR MBP to a LaCie 500G d2 (FW800) in about 120 minutes and has continued with hourly backups since.
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Mar 20, 2012
I just purchased a Seagate 3 TB USB 2.0/3.0 external drive to use as my time machine backup drive. I have a MacBook Pro that was purchased about 3-4 years ago. The MacBook Pro has a 120 GB hard drive and is currently running MAC OSx 10.6.8. I also have another WD 1 TB FireWire external drive that I use to store all of my media files.
After I followed the instructions for installing the new Seagate drive for use with the MAC OSx, I initiated a time machine backup. It very quickly determined that it needed to back up almost 900,000 files totaling just about 400 GB. It started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. In a little less than an hour it reach 53 GB and remained there for an additional two hours before I decided to stop the backup.
Once I got the backup stopped, I deleted the backup and decided to look at my energy saving settings. I noticed that the "Put drives to sleep whenever possible" check box was checked, so I unchecked that option and restarted the MAC. I then initiated the time machine backup again. Like the first time it quickly determined that it needed to backup the same amount of data as before and started the backup process at a rate of about 1 GB per minute. Before going to bed at around 11 PM last night it was at about 60 GB so I thought I was out of the woods (having gotten further than the 53 GB earlier). When I woke up this morning at 5:30 AM it was sitting at 69 GB.
I am really frustrated at this point and don't know why the time machine back up would be failing on a brand new hard drive. PS - I was previously using a Seagate 1.5 TB USB drive as my time machine backup and never had any issues with it. I decided to use the 1.5 TB drive for a different purpose, which is why I have the new 3 TB drive to use as a backup. And I still have the full backup on the 1.5 TB drive just in case anything were to go awry.
Info:
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Jun 24, 2012
How long should the initial backup for time machine take with FireWire 800 for about 120 gb
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Apr 20, 2012
I interrupted my initial Time Machine backup. How do I reinstate the initial backup?
Info:
Time Machine
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May 24, 2012
I've got an iMac with a 1TB harddrive and am trying to use a time machine set up to back up my harddrive. The external harddrive I'm using for my back up is also 1TB. I currently have about 135GB of free space on my iMac's harddrive and my external drive is completely empty. When I try to back up using time machine it tells me that the back up is 1.2TB and cannot fit on my 1TB external harddrive. What would cause the initial back up to be larger than the actual computers harddrive? Is there anything I can do to rectify this issue without me needing to purchase a larger external harddrive for back up?
Info:
iMac Intel Core 2 Duo, Mac OS X (10.6)
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Jan 6, 2011
I know that the first one is supposed to take a long time, but can someone let me know what is going on? I have a 2010 Mac Mini that I have upgraded to 8GB of RAM. I am running the OS off a LaCie 1 TB external running it through FW800. Everything is running well. I just picked up a WD My Book Studio Edition II 2 TB FW800 drive to use as additional storage (partition 1) and Time Machine (partition 2). I have daisy chained the FW drives.
I set my Time Machine up to backup about 400 GB of files from one FW drive to the other. At the same time I am copying over about another 400 GB of files from the OS drive to the partition 1 extra storage portion of the new drive. The 400 GB of copying is taking about 3 hours. That seems OK to me. The Time Machine backup is much slower. I have had it running for about an hour+, and it finished 400 MB of 400 GB. Not that math is my strong suit, but that is on pace to finish my Time Machine backup in 33 days.
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Nov 30, 2008
Time Machine will backup at a rate of 0.5KB/s (rough estimate) then start to speed up a little bit, then just fail. I have tried restarting my Mac, repairing permissions etc, and I've attempted about 10 times to get it to backup. I have spent about 20 minutes on Google trying to see if there is anyone with similar issues - closest I found was someone who's Time Machine would fail once a week.
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Oct 26, 2009
I've recently re-jigged my system and upgraded to Snow Leopard. I've manually restored everything I want from a Time Machine back-up and am now back in business on my main drive. However, I now want to re-enable Time Machine but I'm having some problems; every time I back-up the total size is the same! I've excluded all the things I don't want, such as system-files, applications folder, developer folder, virtual machines folder, and a folder I use for large downloads (so they're not backing up at different stages). Every time though the total back-up size is calculated as the total data on my drive, minus the things I've excluded, and it crawls along at only a few kilobytes to a megabyte or so per-second!
For a volume with just under a terabyte of data that's an awful long time. This doesn't seem right though, as it means that my back-up volume is just going to full up after a couple of back-ups are taken, which is unacceptable. Anyone know what can be done about this? Both the internal and external volume are Journaled HFS+, my only though really is that the back-up drive already has Time Machine files on it, indeed the biggest portion of my files (about 850gb) is already on the drive in the exact-same folder structure as I'm using now, so those files shouldn't even need to be backed up!
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Dec 2, 2008
I'm trying to backup my computer using flock but its moving very slow. I want to reformat my external before I start backing up again also. Can someone let me know what would be the proper way to format my drive and how to fix the slowness problem?
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Jul 1, 2014
I have an extremely slow Time Machine backup. I've gone through the motions and tried to resolve the issue by doing the suggested restart in Safe Mode.I don't use Norton Symantec but I didn't the Norton Remove script through the Console already. I don't run any anti-virus software. This started when I was backing up to at Time Capsule. I backed up to the TC for years before this started. I then moved to backing up (started fresh) to a external HD connected via USB. I have a 2010 Mac Mini with OS X 10.9 (Latest Version)
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Jul 1, 2014
Ok... So, I have an extremely slow Time Machine backup. Many people do. I've gone through the motions and tried to resolve the issue by doing the suggested restart in Safe Mode. I even followed some of the other tips that are on this string: slow time machine backup
Nothing has worked. I don't use Norton Symantec but I didn't the Norton Remove script through the Console already. I don't run any anti-virus software.
This started when I was backing up to at Time Capsule. I backed up to the TC for years before this started. I then moved to backing up (started fresh) to a external HD connected via USB.
I have a 2010 Mac Mini with OS X 10.9 (Latest Version)
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May 17, 2010
I have an external HDD hooked up to my iMac. It's from Freecom, and I believe it contains a Seagate ST310005 disk. I formatted the disk, and set up Time Machine. It seems to go well, TM makes the first back-up without any problems. But, even though TM is turned on and set to back things up, nothing I put on my PC after the initial back-up gets backed up. I put a folder on my desktop, put some files in it, and they are nowhere to be found in the TM back-ups.
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Dec 11, 2009
I have looked into this a lot already. It is to much that Time Machine backs up every single hour! It would be nice to set it to something like 3 or 5 hours. I have tried a 3rd party app to do this, but... If my computer was off or asleep when it was supposed to back up, it would get an error. It would not just do the backup when i turned it on or when it came out of sleep like stock Time Machine does. I have also seen a way to change the time incraments in the Terminal.(I am very good with it, not a noob) I have tried this and it screws up time machine completely. Maybe it does not work with the newest OS X. By the way... I have a 2010 MacBook Pro, got it 2 months ago.
Does anyone know a solid 3rd party app, that will work seamlessly. Or has anyone changed the time in Terminal and are currently using something different than 1 hour. There is a lot of examples online, but I would like the codeing that you literally used.
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Oct 26, 2008
I am getting the following error from Time Machine when doing my first backup. The startup disk being backed up, and the TM disk are both the same size.
Macintosh HD: 465.44 (total); 393.99 (free); 71.45 (free)
Time Machine: 465.44 (total); 465.29 (free)
The Time Machine error is: Quote:
"This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 472.7 GB but only 465.3 GB are available." why would this be? Other disks are excluded from the backup, and Time Machine is telling me that it needs more space than it actually needs. What should I do?
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May 1, 2008
I was a PC user who recently moved to mac. I have a macbook (intel 2.2GHz, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD). When I was using PC, I backed up all my data to a network storage device (Buffalo LinkStation 250 GB connected to a 802.11g netgear router which is supplied by Sky) using a program called SmartSync Pro, which worked very well. Although I can connect to and mount the Share folder on this drive when the macbook is connected to the network, Time Machine will not back up to it. It wouldnt even recognise the disk on the network.
So I went onto the trusty internet, and found that you can get time machine to recognise the Share folder. (This was obtained from: http://blog.imulus.com/george/software/using-leopard-time-machine-to-backup-of-a-network/)See my comment on their page at the bottom, number 66.
It recommended entering the following in to the Terminal: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
Before attempting backup I have to go into "Network" and select the Share folder by double clicking on it. This seems to mount the volume. After this, it can be seen in Time Machine as a potential backup destination.
However, this method does not work for me. Time Machine "prepares" for a while, then gives the following message: Time Machine error. The backup disk image could not be created.
More internet searching took me to macosxhints which suggests creating something called a sparsebundle image on my local system. (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080420211034137) Have not tried this yet as I thought it would be prudent to seek some help first.
Apple have deliberately disabled the ability for Time Machine to back up to network attached storage, (except of course to their proprietory Time Capsule):
Is this because time machine requires a network faster than 802.11g?
Is this because a time machine backup to a network attached storage device is unreliable and the data is corrupted?
I dont want to shell out more cash for a time capsule. I would prefer not to have to hardwire to an external drive (which I will also have to go out and buy). Any thoughts?
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Apr 30, 2012
I have a external HD which has always worked fine under snow leopard. Since upgrading to lion I keep getting the following message The identity of the backup disk has changed since the previous backup.The disk may have been replaced or erased, or someone may be trying to trick your computer into backing up to the wrong disk. And after this the drive disappears from the desktop appearing agian only after restart. What can I do do rectify this? Delete and re-intialise the drive?
Info:
MacProQuad2.6 4gbRam, Mac OS X (10.4.8)
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Jan 9, 2010
Just wanted to check if he problem was unique to my MBA (Rev B, HDD) or you notice it too ;
My Time Machine backup takes up to 6 hours to do a backup of about 30GB. And each backup size is 31.5GB everytime !!
I have the following Config - 80 GB for OSX (53GB Free) and 40 GB (10GB Free) for Win 7 on Bootcamp. Sometimes I wonder if TM making a backup of Win 7 also everytime. (Does it mean - In a way its good, that means I should be able to restore the entire hard disk from TM including Applications, Win 7 , bootcamp and all the programmes installed in Win 7 in case I have a problem ?)
But the speed should still be fast... 6 hours to do a 32GB backup is torturous specially because then I have to leave the machine alone and cannot use it.
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Mar 9, 2012
Is there a way to make a backup of your Time Machine backup on a 2nd hard drive? I want to be doubly sure that my data is backed up!Right now I get an error saying that the second hard drive isn't authorized to copy my Time Machine data from the original hard drive I have set up as my Time Machine.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Nov 19, 2008
I just replaced my HD on my 15"MBP. The install went well until restoring my data from Time Machine. The apps came over fine but none of my data did. Yes, I checked all the boxes on the "restore from backup" menu.
Of course now when I start up time machine the backup isn't there. How do I get Time Machine to recognize the backup? I have it on two places - a time capsule and a separate external HD.
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Jan 11, 2011
I just replaced the stock 160GB HD in my unibody macbook with a WD Blue Scorpio 640GB HD. I used Super Duper to clone the old drive to the new one, approximately 115 GB.
Now Time Machine wants to backup the full 115GB to my Time Capsule, which kinda sucks because it's going to be a redundent backup that's gonna take up over a 10th of my TC's space. Is there any way to avoid this and still use Time Machine?
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May 3, 2009
I have a 1tb external for time machine back up and have about 750 gb of stuff to back up. I was under the impression that when time machine backs up my stuff it will automatically delete the oldest backup to create room for the newer backup.
My problem is that i did a back up a couple weeks ago and then today i go to back up and it tells me back up failed only 718gb available for 740gb of stuff to back up
anyone have this problem? how can i fix it?
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May 23, 2009
Well TM is acting up. I get an error that reads: "This backup is too large for the backup volume."
Both the internal boot disk and the external baclup drive are 1TB. The internal one has a two partitions, the OSX one that is 900GBs and a 32GB NTFS one for Boot Camp. The external drive is a single OSX Extended part. that is 932GBs.
Both the Time Machine disk, and the Boot Camp disk are excluded from the backup along with a "Crap" folder for temporary large files.
Time Machine says it needs 938GBs to backup only the OSX disk, which has 806GBs in use with the rest free. WTFFF?
This happened after moving a large folder (128GB in total) from the root of the OSX disk over to my Home Folder.
I have reformated the Time Machine drive and have no backups at all of my data and it refuses to backup!!
Why would it need 938GBs of space to backup if the disk has "only" 806 GBs in use??? Is there anyway to reset Time Machine completely???
Some quick screenshots:
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Feb 10, 2012
my TM wil not back up! It states that this backup is too large for the backup disk. The back up disk requires 573.50 GB but only 225.23 GB are available. The TM needs work space on the backup disk, in addition to the space required to store backups. Upen TM perferences to select a LARGER backup disk or make the backup smaller by excluding file.
Okay I;m sorry but obvioulsy I dont get this. I've never called Apple for help! I have every product they sell practically including Protection Plans I never used and no one will help me with this. My MAC is starting to have black or white screens and i can hear it running but it will not do anything so i have to reboot it, it screws up Enturage and then I have to rebuild that ( 5 times this year) anyway... I would like to back everything up- can I delete everything on the Time Capsule or Time Machine; god I dont even know what it is called Im so MAD... help if you can please. I'm going to have to take this to the genius people at the store and probably buy another computer but like before they will not save my files.
Info:
Mac OS X (10.7.3), time cap or Time Machine
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Jun 30, 2014
There are 3 macs:
A: an old macbook (the white one)
B: a modern macbook pro (retina)
C: another modern macbook pro (TBD)
I am giving away B now; I expect to get C in 2 months time; I keep A with me all the time.
The goal is to migrate all of the data from B to C. I have Time Machine backups of B.
Since the transition is a long time (2 months), I need to keep working on my data during this period. For this I will use A. This will generate new files, modify old ones, ...
Since A's HDD is much smaller than B's backup, I can move only part of them.
By the way, I have totally erased A and used migration assistant to restore part of my old data from B. So, when I use A now, I do it with my same account as in B (and the same I will use in C).
How do I manage my backups in such a way that, when I will get C, I can safely move all of the data I had in B plus all of the changes and modifications that I have done during the 2 month transition?
Can I just continue to use Time Machine (on A) to update the old backups? I am afraid that some mess could be created because the computers are different (before the backups were taken on B, while now on A), even the present data are different (because now A only contains a subset of the original B data, which I do NOT want to lose), the good point is that the user is the same.
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Mar 11, 2009
I have an external 500gb drive plugged into my brand new Time Capsule. The 500gb drive basically stores my entire library of music and my iTunes points to this external drive.
Is it possible to have time machine backup all information on the 500gb drive to the time capsule, so encase the external drive takes a dump, I don't loose my entire music library? Maybe time machine is already doing this, I am not sure.
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Mar 11, 2012
I have a MacBook Air and a Time Capsule - both from november 2011.Using Time Machine is givning me som problems.It works fine for some days, an is backing up as planned.But at least 5 times since I got the Time Capsule, Time Machine is asking to make a full Backup, and when I look in Time Machine, it says that there is no "old backup". It has been runing since november 2011.When I start a new backup, as it ask for, it takes at least 24 hours to finish - some times even longer.Is this normal? If not, what do I do?
Info:
Time Machine, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Jun 19, 2014
MacBook Pro mid-2012, 8GB RAM, 750GB hard drive, Mac OS X 10.8.5
One Time Capsule at home
One Time Capsule in vacation home
MBP backs up everything on internal hard drive to Time Capsule at home, where we live during summer and spring. When moving to vacation home in fall and winter, MBP backs up everything to Time Capsule in vacation home.
During the 6 months at each residence, the backups work great to the Time Capsule at that particular house. However, after some time (maybe a week?), Time Machine displays an error in Notification Center: "Time Machine can't complete backup to Home Time Capsule" (when in vacation home) or "Time Machine can't complete backup to Vacation Time Capsule" (when at home).
It's obvious that this occurs because Time Machine was set to back up to 2 Time Capsules and expects both of them to be reachable. Is there a way to suppress these Time Machine errors for the time that we're away from one of the Time Capsules?
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Dec 6, 2010
So I bought a brand new WD 1TB Elements (USB) to use with Time Machine. I've never used a Time Machine before. I have a MBP13 with a 250GB disk, using the latest Snow Leopard, all updates installed. Formatted the drive to Mac OS Journaled (extended) and set it to use with Time Machine. Works until about 15-17GBs is copied over, than it fails:
1. If I start over it fails very soon after, no matter how many times I retry
2. No matter how many times I reformat it, it always fails
3. I tried one trick I googled - deleting the "inprogress" file - does NOT help
4. SMART status is verified
5. There are no problems if I verify/repair the disk.
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Mar 7, 2009
Can someone tell me how to configure Time Machine so it doesn't do a complete backup every time?I seem to get constant errors because my disk space fills up quickly. For some reason I don't think it did this when I first started using it. I use SuperDuper also, but have a drive connected to my iMac all the time for Time Machine.
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May 16, 2012
How can you set a specific time for backup instead of every hour on Time Machine?
Info:
Mac OS X (10.5.8)
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